“I was fired because I was a Brazilian, and a temporary employee, even though I had been a hard worker for the past three years,” said Oguihara, one of some 300,000 Japanese Brazilians in Japan who are allowed to stay longer than most unskilled foreign workers because of their ancestral ties.

“I may have to return to Brazil if I can’t find a new job,” Oguihara said.

She has been in Japan for most of the time since 1997, working for auto plants scattered around Toyota city in central Japan — home to mighty Toyota and a number of smaller subcontractors.

Many other Japanese Brazilians, including her cousin who has worked at a plant for the electronics titan Sony, have also lost their jobs amid the recession, leaving them with the problem of finding somewhere to live and education for their children who are used to living in Japan, she said.

It’s not just foreigners losing their jobs. Japanese temporary workers — who make up an increasingly large share of the workforce following the deregulation of the labor market in recent years — have also been affected.

“It’s outrageous. I’ve been working hard to one day become a permanent worker, but that dream was crushed,” said Hidetomo Kita, 37, a temporary worker who lost his job at truck maker Hino Motors last month.

“They’ve exploited us when they were busy, then shed us even though we worked as much as permanent employees did. It’s so unfair,” Kita said, adding that he was worried as his wife, a temporary worker for another manufacturer, was also on the verge of losing her job.

Toyota, which expects to post its first-ever operating loss this year, is cutting 3,000 temporary jobs at its domestic plants.

Japanese have traditionally seen themselves as a equitable, middle-class society thanks to life-time employment and a narrow gap between the rich and the poor.

But critics say those days are gone, largely because of free-market reforms including deregulation in 2004 that allowed the manufacturing industry to use temporary staff in their plants.

Today, roughly one in three workers in Japan are non-regular employees, including temporary workers who generally receive lower wages than permanent workers — a group often described as “the working poor.”

Many workers find themselves with nowhere to live when they lose their jobs — and with it the cheap company dormitory they were living in, said Yoshimitsu Wada, a trade union leader for temporary workers.